Publisher: Beatshapers
Developer: Beatshapers
Genre: Arcade puzzle
ESRB rating: Everyone
Release date: Available now

PlayStation Vita, Sony’s fancy new handheld, released in early 2012 in North America with more than two dozen launch games. Many of them, such as Uncharted: Golden Abyss and Unit 13, were the type of game that require a considerable time investment in each play session. But most adults who play portable game systems only really use them in small chunks of time, such as on public transportation or while waiting for the end of the final spin cycle. Developer/publisher Beatshapers has helped to fill this void with Stardrone: Extreme, a fast-paced, sometimes-maddening arcade game that only takes a few minutes of your valuable time for each addictive level.

Stardrone: Extreme is the small-screen version of Stardrone, an indie game for the PS3 and the PC that was a finalist at the 2011 IndieCade Independent Video Games Festival. At the beginning of each of Extreme‘s 60 levels, a tiny space ship is launched into a colorful maze of stars, obstacles and floating enemies. Energy beacons are placed at various positions in the maze. Once the ship is launched, momentum keeps it moving constantly forward. Your job is to guide the ship through the mazes by tapping the beacons, which send out gravity beams that attach to the ship. These allow you to alter its trajectory. The beams detach when lift your finger from the touchscreen (or the rear touchpad).

Each level involves one of three general objectives. In Collect All Stars, you have to pilot the ship through the maze, lighting up all of the stars by flying into them. Destroy All Enemies isn’t as simple as it might sound. A meter at the top of the screen fills up as you collect stars. When the meter is full, your ship turns into the Stardrone equivalent of Pac-Man after he swallows the power pill. While the ship is powered up, it can kill almost any enemy with one touch and can breach obstacles that would take many impacts while the ship is in its normal state. But the energy meter slowly drains after the ship is powered up, so you have to continue to kill enemies or light up stars to keep the power flowing. The third game mode has you simply guiding the ship through the maze to the exit point. This is the toughest of the three modes, since powerup opportunities are few and one missed tap on a gravity beacon can mean failure.

The controls for Extreme can’t be simpler — the only control is your finger. You aim the cannon by touching the screen; lift your finger to fire. After that it’s just touching and releasing the beacons to point the ship in the right direction. There are times when using the front touchscreen puts your hand between your eyes and the ship, which can be fatal in the increasingly complex later levels, so learning how to play with the rear touchpad can be a game-saver. The graphics are very colorful, almost psychedelic, set against the flat black backdrop of space. And the music and sound effects remind me of old arcade games, effective and strangely memorable. Some of the enemies require more than one hit to destroy; it almost sounds like they’re laughing at you when you hit them the first time. Also, cross-platform play with the PS3 is supposedly coming through a PS3 patch.

Only a couple of things get in the way of Extreme success. Each level includes a minimap set in the bottom corner of the screen, “mini” being the important part of the description. It’s so small and translucent that it blends into the playfield, making it useless in many cases. If you fail a level (and you will, many dozens of times), you’re given the choice of skipping it and moving to the next, even after only failing one time, so you could theoretically reach the final level in only a few minutes. But most unnerving about Extreme is the frustration factor. The touchscreen controls are very precise. It can take a long time and many failures to finally become comfortable with them. And once you reach the final level (which you can’t skip), you have no stars to gather, which means no power-up mode. It will take the average player a long time and many deaths to learn the pattern of the maze (the minimap is little help) and the locations of all the elements that they have to either reach or avoid. It can take several hours to get through the first 59 levels, and perhaps just as long to get to the end of the 60th. Controller-hurlers will be in serious danger of ruining their $300 hardware. Several times I’ve managed to get my little ship within pixels of the goal, only to hit a jag-toothed wall and dying.

Stardrone: Extreme gives casual players a quasi-arcade game that has simple controls and can be comfortably played in small doses, while making good use of the PS Vita’s powerful hardware. And best of all, at $3.99 it’s probably the best value for your money of any game available for the device. An improved minimap (or perhaps putting one in the pause menu) would go a long way towards reducing the frustration that the game can generate, but it still gives you plenty of on-the-go entertainment that you can probably finance using the coins in your couch cushions.

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